Yale Switching To Gmail, Not Without Opposition

PwnSnake writes "While it makes sense for small (and large) corporations to move to Gmail, something seems amiss when a top private university decides to hand everything over to Google. Although most in that community seem to welcome the change, several organizations on campus have joined forces to call for a transparent process and get students and faculty thinking about the downsides of the switch. The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."

Comments

Having gone there...

[langelgjm]

I was a grad student there, and most of the people I knew hated the Horde webmail interface. I practically never used it, since I've always set up IMAP.

My current university also outsources most of their student e-mail services to Google... again, I almost always access it through IMAP. The main downside I've run into is that the university version of Gmail doesn't have access to Labs features that you get with regular Gmail.

Re:Having gone there...

[ircmaxell]

My old college didn't even expose imap or pop (Nor could I implement forwarding). You HAD to use their horrid web interface. It led to the accounts never being checked. While there are concerns over gmail, it does open up quite a bit of flexibility.

Re:News flash: you'll never make everyone happy.

[TheRaven64]

I looked at that FAQ, and it says that Google employees will never have access to your email unless access is explicitly grated by your admin. It also says, in the same answer, that Google employees may delete things which violate their ToS, which seems to directly contradict this (how can they delete things without write access, how can they know it violates the ToS without read access?). The answer about whether they complied with EU data protection laws was a very round-about way of saying 'no'.

What did I not see on that page:

• Who is performing third party security audits (no one?).
• What internal policies and security measures Google has in place to prevent their employees accessing the data.
• How these policies are enforced.
• What legal guarantee Google offers of your privacy and what compensation they offer in cases of a breach.

It always amazes me when people read a puff-piece full of buzzwords and devoid of any content, yet come away completely reassured.

Non-unique.

[MrCrassic]

All of the issues they're clamoring over are completely non-unique. The simple fact that Google is giving Yale their Google Mail service for free is an advantage that cannot be glossed over in one sentence (as these authors did) for the following reasons:

• It reduces their operating costs and overhead tremendously. Reliable e-mail systems can cost tremendous amounts of money on licensing alone; removing that burden liberates a huge chip on their shoulders.
• It reduces power consumption, thus reducing monthly costs and increasing eco-friendliness. Yale will probably have a local server on-site which handles backups, but switching to GMail nonetheless allows administrators to either turn off a few servers or reuse them for some other purpose.
• It makes the lives of sysadmins easier. Working with Exchange, Zimbra or whichever email system they currently have on a full-time basis is not easy pickings. Many awkward things can go awry, and a transition to GMail shifts the onus of responsibility on Google's staff, not theirs.

This doesn't include the fact that no system, regardless of how well it's put together, is immune to the occassional outage. One can argue that administrators don't have much control over fixing an outage on Google's turf, but they have shown consistently that they can get everything back in working order extremely quickly. Plus, being able to manage millions of accounts (which include calendaring and contact storage for almost every account) while retaining extremely reliable levels of uptime is impressive.

I think the only reason why large-scale corporations haven't considered doing the same is to retain compliance. (Legal would never allow it).

Re:Gmail also occasionally goes down

[guruevi]

It's called outsourcing, contractors and management.

I work at a University that has recently outsourced their student e-mail to GMail. The University IT group has really bad management. There is a CIO, 3 Vice Presidents and 5 directors for an IT group roughly 300 people with 70% of them being contractors. Each group within the IT group (Exchange, Unix, NT, Mail, Helpdesk, Networking...) has their own 1 or 2 managers.

Of course when it's time to look for a solution, the contractors love to propose their 'appliances' and 'do-it-all software' with 'vendors' and 'partners' because their contracting companies are being sponsored by those companies. That's why we have Exchange with Quest Extensions ($25000/server for a piece of software that only SHOWS the flow of e-mail on a pretty screen), NetApp storage at $5/GB/year, PeopleSoft, Microsoft SMS/WSUS with Quest Extensions (so you can attempt to use WSUS on a Mac bound to Active Directory and Novell Linux bound to Active Directory - Solaris and Debian what's that), some random companies DHCP server appliances - $2500 for a piece of hardware that only does DHCP based on the open source dhcpd, a paid version of SysLog (the actual open source syslog-ng software) with licensing based on logs per hour.

Management thinks that this is normal and the way to do business. Of course their overhead is so large that hardly anybody uses their services as it is cheaper to get your own sysadmin and invest in hardware. So University IT supports about 20 of the smallest departments - those that are too small to pay for a single sysadmin, they need about 200 people to do that job (the other 100 are in networking, server admins and telephone)

should have complained to dean of your college

[voss]

If the schools email system failed to properly send your class assignments and you didnt receive emails properly,
you should have contacted the university and appealed your grade. At the very least the university would have
allowed you to retake the class without cost or GPA penalty. You couldnt have been the only person in school this happened to.

You may still be able to appeal if nothing else to just get the F removed from your transcript(I assume to retook the course).
If you kept your emails since then you can print out your email directory where the old emails are missing.